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Randy Barnett Profile picture
Randy Barnett
@RandyEBarnett
GeorgetownLawProf/Books: A Life for Liberty/Our Republican Constitution/Restoring the Lost Constitution/The Structure of Liberty/Original Meaning of 14th Amdmt
6 subscribers
Nov 1 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I am very pleased to announce that the con law videos that @JoshMBlackman and I created for our book, Introduction to Constitutional Law, are now becoming available for free on @YouTube in time for final exams. The 1st batch is on constitutional structure. Marbury v Madison (1803)
Jul 28 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
I’ve been fortunate to appear in a number of excellent podcasts to discuss my new book “A Life for Liberty: The Making of an American Originalist.” While there is some repetition, each host has focussed on different questions and issues. A thread 🧵:
a.co/d/48K61Qw This episode of @nro’s the Bookmonger with John Miller provided a brief (15 minute) overview of the book:
nationalreview.com/podcasts/the-b…
Jun 22 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The collective “state’s right” reading of the Second Amendment was largely invented in the 20th century. No contemporary statements of that view from either the Founding or Reconstruction period—when militias were the bad guys—have been presented. In 2000, an all-new “militia-conditioned individual right” theory was formulated as a response to contrary scholarship in a law review symposium paid for by the Joyce Foundation. This, not the state’s right theory, was the theory adopted by Stevens in his Heller dissent.
May 26 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
.@JoshMBlackman quotes the AP: “The day after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton to win the 2016 presidential election, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took the bench wearing a black necklace with crystals. It was a piece she typically wore to express her displeasure while reading a dissent from the bench. But Ginsburg, who had called Trump a faker ahead of the election and then apologized, had no dissents to read.
Ginsburg's collars were more than a subtle statement every time she entered the courtroom.”

reason.com/volokh/2024/05… And the NYT: “Her dissent collar, a spiky bejeweled necklace on a black band from Banana Republic that had been gifted to her when she was named a Glamour Woman of the Year in 2012, she wore when she read her equally spiky dissents from the bench. (She also wore it the day after the 2016 election, which no one thought was a coincidence”
Apr 4 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Roberto Unger my first year Critical Legal Studies Contracts professor after our last exams. It was because of his class that I became a Contracts professor to refute him.
Image Fun fact from my memoir: When visited Harvard to teach Contracts, the profs told me that my classmates had complained to the dean that we were not learning Contracts but were learning Unger. So mine was the only year he taught the course.
Mar 9 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I’m now reading Frank Meyer’s 1955 book, “In Defense of Freedom.” So far, it’s a remarkably insightful and unjustly neglected book. The dire political and cultural similarities between then and now actually provides reason for hope today.
a.co/d/i4HXi0t Meyer begins by trenchantly criticizing the “New Conservatism” exemplified by Russell Kirk, as a wholly inadequate response to collectivism and scientism.
Feb 7 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I’ve seen enough. SCOTUS will hold that, to be used as a sword, Section 3 requires congressional legislation. The primary basis will be precedent (e.g. Griffin’s Case), but buttressed by some originalist evidence and consequences. 8-1 or 9-0. The Court won’t need to reach the issue of whether the president is an “officer of the United States” or holds office “under the United States.”
Sep 20, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
We sometimes hear nonoriginalists observing that there are so many “flavors” of originalism offered as an objection to originalism. Of course, the vast majority of originalist academics are original public meaning originalists, which is also the method to which virtually all judges who identify as originalists purport to be utilizing, however well or poorly, when they actually do originalism, which is infrequently. But it’s true that there are also original intent originalism, original methods originalism, and original law originalism. In most cases, each of these methods leads to the same outcomes.

But what about nonoriginalism? My students often ask me what that theory is. Turns out there are even more flavors of living constitutionalism.
Jun 13, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Trump had a second bite of the apple after winning but—likely on advice of counsel—chose to respect the “No Banana Republic” norm. It was Obama who needed to step up—which he could have done as a lame duck before Trump took office. Obama could have adhered to the “no one is above the law” norm by seeing Clinton prosecuted without any banana republic implications. But he didn’t because some people today are above the law. Lots of people.
Jun 11, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Does Article IV obligated the United States to protect "every State in this Union" against spouse abuse? That's what "domestic violence" means today. "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence."